Etymology

The season is about to start. When you tramp the trail by the Willamette, passing a stand of ailing cottonwoods, you imagine the ground trembling with possibility. Last year at this time, a few days into spring, you found a handful of half-free morels along this stretch of river bottom, mostly ravaged by squirrels, and this year you’re determined to catch them just as they pop from the sandy bank. But so far you’ve seen nothing, only trudged four miles in the rain and stomped through puddles you can’t avoid.

Patience, you tell yourself, though after a long winter, you have none. There’s a harried quality to your search, a fevered intensity, as if the future depends upon your success. Why do you believe the news you read every morning will be less awful, the world less doomed, if only you can find a few wild mushrooms on this bleak Sunday afternoon?

Instead, you go home and do some research. First you look up things you already know about morels’ habitats and the timing of their fruiting. You did this same research a year ago. Then you make the mistake of pulling out your condensed OED and looking up the etymology of forage. It’s supposed to imply a connection to nature, you think, to being in sync with the landscape and the seasons. You want to believe this newfound passion restores something in your blood, brings you back to a time when people spent a few hours working to sustain themselves and their families and the rest of their time socializing with neighbors. You don’t particularly want to socialize with neighbors this afternoon—or most afternoons—preferring instead to wander beneath wind-blown trees in the rain while your spouse and child are at their roller derby practice, but perhaps if you didn’t have to deal with people at work all week, you’d be more amenable to talking to them on weekends.

When you use the word to describe how you spend those weekends—as well as the occasional weekday you can sneak away from the university campus where you teach—you’re claiming not just a mindset but a political position: you’re clearly someone devoted to conservation and sustainability, even to radical action to preserve what’s quickly being lost. But now, when you reach the correct page, you’re disappointed—crushed, in fact—to discover the word, at least in its Old French origins, doesn’t suggest anything as virtuous as you’d imagined.

Initially it had nothing to do with reverence for nature, nor with the activity of ancient ancestors who hunted and gathered a few hours a day. As a noun, at least, it’s fairly benign, coming from the word for hay or straw, similar to the English fodder. But it was first used as a verb in the fifteenth century, and then it would have translated as to plunder or to pillage. The forager in medieval France was looting his neighbors’ barns for hay to feed his own livestock. By the late 1700s, forage did begin to take on its modern connotations of to hunt about and to gather, but even then the context was ugly: it came into regular use to describe Napoleon’s retreating army after the Russians routed them, when soldiers scavenged ransacked villages for anything that might keep them from starving on their way back to Paris.

As you scour the woods, you don’t want to think of yourself in relation to marauding French soldiers, but what other word is there to describe what you do? You haven’t yet harvested a single mushroom this spring, and already you’ve got blood on your hands. But that doesn’t keep you from searching. Another two weeks pass with no sign of treasure. Patience, you remind yourself, and then your colleague C sends a text: Saw this walking home from work. Just a few blocks from you. With it, a photo of a perfect morel.

You’re in your shoes and rain jacket and out the door before hearing back with a more specific location. In fact, you walk a block in the wrong direction, with a stride suggesting not just purpose or even urgency but downright desperation. C’s second text sends you the right way. Even before you find the exact spot, you guess it from halfway down the street: a patch of woodchips in the public utility easement. It’s next to a little blue bungalow whose side garden has been let go a bit though not entirely neglected. One section sports raised beds containing a few volunteer brassica sprouts—arugula, maybe, or kale—along with some weeds, and closer to the house is a row of healthy boxwoods that could use some pruning. Not so different from your own yard, though you want to believe the residents don’t care at all about what grows here. Their blinds are closed, in any case, which, as you draw near, gives you a chance to slow, crouch, and let your eyes adjust.

And there it is: a laddered landscape morel, a variety that fruits earlier than the American blondes most common by the river. It’s the only type that’s saprophytic rather than mycorrhizal, meaning their mycelium decompose the material in which they grow rather than form a symbiotic relationship with the trees nearby. They’re also, according to one of your guidebooks, the blandest tasting of all morels. But in your experience, this means they still taste better than most other things on the planet. This one is about two and a half inches tall already, big enough on its own to flavor a plate of pasta if cooked in a bit of butter, garlic, white wine.

But it’s not on its own. While you’re examining it, several more caps pop into view. This is usually the way it happens with morels: you’ll be staring at an unassuming patch of ground, seeing nothing, letting your eyes unfocus as you used to do with the 3-D posters kids hung on their dorm room walls when you were in college, and then, out of the surrounding chaos of wood chips and dirt emerge little cones with distinct ridges and pits. Now you spot four, five, six in all.

You snap photos with your phone. Nothing stirs behind the closed blinds, but still, this is someone else’s property, and it would be a violation to take them without permission. Wouldn’t it? Just seeing them provides useful information, in any case, a sign that the season has indeed begun, and you can look for more laddered landscapes growing in the public park two blocks to the north. You force yourself to move on, texting C your photos on the way. The park is full of woodchips spread last year, a perfect morel habitat, but there are no mushrooms in sight. Your mouth waters. C texts back: The big one’s been there a week at least. The people don’t want them. You should def take them.

C has always struck you as an upstanding person with high ethical standards. In order to reduce their environmental impact, she and her husband share a single car between them, which is why, even though she lives a mile farther from work than you, she regularly walks through your neighborhood. So with her permission, you don’t hesitate for a moment to return to the little bungalow. This time you approach more furtively, crouching earlier, in case any neighbors are watching from adjacent windows. Lucky for you, it’s raining again, and no one is outside. You snap off the big morel and debate whether to leave the small ones for someone else—or maybe to let them grow and come back for them in a few days.

In the end, however, you take all six, slipping them into the pockets of your rain jacket. Half will go to C, you decide. A finder’s fee. A share of pirate’s booty.

The woodchips look barren now, truly neglected. Perhaps plunder and pillage are apt synonyms for what you do after all.

Scott Nadelson is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Trust Me, winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the story collection While It Lasts.

Published July 15 2025